


Fruit too ripe to eat

by Basingstoke



Series: Matt the Virgin [1]
Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-30
Updated: 2016-04-30
Packaged: 2018-06-05 11:43:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6703306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Basingstoke/pseuds/Basingstoke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the story you have, not the story you want.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fruit too ripe to eat

Frank was back in New York, because he couldn't get away for long. 

Matt was Matt, so they were fighting. 

He couldn't figure Matt out. Seemed too honest to be lying, so he was a blind man? But he fought like a god damn demon, a boxer crossed with a ninja fueled by rage. So what, he had ESP? 

While he was working through this, Matt was climbing onto his back and compressing his carotid artery with his thighs. Frank staggered into a chimney, then fell to his knees, and Matt flipped him over onto his back and kept choking him with a knee to the throat. 

With his vision fading to white, Frank tapped out. Slapped Matt's thigh three times. Hoped that was enough of a signal. 

Matt let him go. Frank watched the world spin around itself and felt the air move in and out of his nose. Matt didn't fuck around when he took you down. Frank appreciated that. 

"Going to kill anyone tonight?" Matt asked. 

Frank coughed. 

Matt looped his grappling line around Frank's neck and straddled his chest. "Are you killing anyone tonight?" he asked again. 

"Guess not," Frank said. 

"I can do this as long as I have to."

"Until the world burns around us? Your call." There was a pool of silence on the street beneath them, thick and unnatural in the city. When someone had to pass by this building, they hushed, and they walked quickly, and they didn't catch anyone's eye. 

Matt shifted off him, sat against the chimney. Frank sat beside him. "I know what's going on around us," Matt said. "I know." 

"But you don't feel it like I feel it. Soft-hearted." 

"I feel it." 

"But you can stand to see them live." 

"I have hope for them." 

"Soft." 

"Hope is more difficult than despair. It takes work to stand up over and over, to lift people up even when they fling themselves down. I'm not blind. I see what happens. I do it anyway," Matt said. 

Sirens, ten blocks away or more. Nothing serious. The buzz of the electric billboard overhead. A cat in the alley. Silence in the street, where there were no humans. "Figuratively not blind," Frank said. 

Matt exhaled. "Figuratively." 

"How the fuck do you work, anyway?" 

Matt shrugged. "I can hear you. I can smell that you've been sitting in the sun all day. I can taste the gunpowder in the air around you. It's not one thing, it's everything." 

"Hm." He sniffed his sleeve, but he couldn't smell anything. Tar, maybe. A hint of sweat. Must be more than a hint to Matt. "Sorry." 

"If you were straight out of the shower, you would smell like soap. Now you smell like yourself. I prefer it." 

"Huh." 

"Despite appearances, I'm straight. I like the smell of alpha," Matt said, half a smile on his lips. 

"You arguing dynamic essentialism or just flirting?" 

Matt laughed. "You picked an interesting time to come back to town, Frank. And you should use your nose more." 

He knew a line when he heard it. He leaned in, just a little, and Matt tipped his head back and let him take a sniff. And there it was, the heady stink of heat. "I'm a city boy. Burned out my nose in self-defense," Frank said. 

"No excuses. I was born in Metro-General." 

"Me too," Frank said. "Never left until I enlisted."

"I tried to leave. Tried to travel. Everyone was too fucking nice."

"Too much open space."

"I missed the garbage smell. That's when I knew I had to come back." 

"Shit," Frank said, impressed. "You love this fucking place." 

"I do." 

Sirens again. Matt twitched, following the sound. 

"Hear something more interesting?" 

Matt turned back to him, shaking his head. "Nobody in this city is more dangerous than you tonight." 

The building below them hummed with music and guns, full of walking corpses who hadn't fallen down yet. "You say the sweetest things," Frank said. 

"Lying is a sin." 

Frank edged a little closer, near enough that their sleeves brushed, their knees touched. "So, you don't believe in birth control, or are you going home to someone tonight?" The Pill stopped ovulation, so it stopped heat. Some omegas went off birth control for bedroom fun reasons. His wife had. He would have had eight kids if not for heavy-duty spermicide. 

Maybe he would have stayed home then. Moved out of the city. Taken them upstate, where it was cheaper and safer. Maybe they would all be alive if he had been a better Catholic.

"The former. It doesn't sit right with me," Matt said.

"You always go fighting alphas around this time? This your thing?" 

"It usually works out that way. Statistically, alphas commit more crimes." 

"Fighting alphas, dressed in leather. Sounds like a real expensive dirty movie."

"Disappointing ending, though," Matt said. "I won't share heats before marriage. Do they make blue-balls kink videos?" 

"Probably." A good Catholic boy. The devil costume started to make sense. "You really believe God will strike you down for fucking?" 

"No. I believe the joining of two bodies is a sacrament. I don't believe in playing around with the gifts I've been given by God. And I want a child to come of it, and I don't want that from just anyone." 

"Huh." 

"So until that time comes, if it ever comes, God has given me two hands and a waterproof suction cup vibrator."

Frank laughed, a little, but he was caught by the thought of Matt, pregnant. The Devil dodging bullets and guarding the life inside him. Head in his bulletproof helmet bent over a nursing baby. Strutting down the sidewalk, cane in one hand, sleeping toddler in the other. 

Nothing like his wife. Nothing familiar. 

He stared at him, trapped in possibility. The Devil and a man, an omega, a promise of life ripe within him. 

"Would you stop?" Matt asked.

"Stop," Frank echoed, unable to understand. 

"If we created something here, tonight, if I anchored myself to you, if I tied up your spear," Matt said. He touched his belly, soft under the armor. "Could you stop taking life if I created life with you?" 

It was a livid question, tangible in the air, buzzing in his nostrils with every breath. It tugged at his face from the inside, drawing him in with promise. 

"I don't know how to stop," Frank said. He didn't know how to stop. 

Matt looked away. "Yeah." 

He took Frank's hand. 

"I don't know how to stop either," Matt said. "Are you done tonight, though?" 

"Missed the window. Gotta find the next one," Frank said. 

"Then I'll see you wherever that is." Matt stood. He took Frank's face in his hands. "And I'll ask the question again in six months. Regular as clockwork." 

He leaned down. Kissed him. Frank closed his eyes. 

The answer was never going to be yes. Not with six more months of blood between them, and six more months after that. He took the kiss, though, light and fleeting and sweet, and took the moment of possibility too, even if it wasn't real, even if it couldn't happen. 

He kept his eyes closed as Matt left him. Then he picked up his gun. 

End.

**Author's Note:**

> My Twitter: [@Basinke](https://twitter.com/Basinke). Talk to me! 
> 
> My Tumblr: [basinke](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/basinke). Look at things I have looked at!


End file.
